Grammar question! Is there a preposition required in the sentence “Do you remember the place I went to dinner?
Big and fancy is not usually your best bet. This analogy might or might not help, but straightening out grammatical structure is a lot like reducing fractions (or, more frequently, algebraic equations). For example: The sentence in question is: “Do you remember the place I went to dinner?” First, let’s simplify it to a statement:”You remember the place I went to dinner.” Technically, this is two separate sentences (“You remember the place” and “I went to dinner”) run together without preposition, conjunction, or punctuation. This in itself is grammatically incorrect. Next, we select the primary sentence and reduce it to its simplest structure, which in this case is Subject-Verb-Object: “You remember the place.” What follows (“I went to dinner”) is a prepositional phrase modifying “place,” and it requires a preposition to connect it. Either of these should work, though “where,” I think, is preferable: “Do you remember the place where I went to dinner?” “Do you remember the place that I
